Some figures I remember seeing some time ago suggested less than a third of eligible passengers claim the compensation.

Update 28/1/2013: I finally found the info I knew I’d seen… it’s from 2010 and actually it was about 5% of eligible people who claim compensation.

It raises the question of why the compensation can’t be automatic. It’s something I recall raising with officialdom at one point. One reason cited was privacy considerations. But there’s ways around that.

The Myki database is used to rule whether a claim is eligible. This means it could also be used to actively work out who should get the compensation. If the government had pursued this, it could have been a genuine benefit of Myki over Metcard.

It could work like this:

Metro: Hey PTV*, we owe people compo! Can you let us know how much money is payable?

PTV: yeah no worries Metro. We’ll just scan the database. Okay, apart from the people who opted out of getting auto compo for privacy reasons, it’s X people, with a total of $Y due.

Metro: Okie dokie, we’ll send you the money…

PTV: got it, ta. We’ll pay it into the appropriate Myki accounts

Easy.

Of course, with less than a third 5% of people bothering to send the forms in, one doesn’t need to be a brainiac to realise why this doesn’t happen.

Why not go further? Myki knows where and when you touch on, and (normally) where you touch off. Why not process the data and directly compensate those customers that were directly affected by a major disruption? Who knows, this might even be cheaper than trying to compensate everyone.

The beauty of this approach is that the processing could be done in a completely independent system to the actual Myki system. Just dump the data, crunch it, reload the compensation list. Almost no software risk and development could be done independently of Kamco.

Going further, why shouldn’t every holder of a registered Myki card receive compensation? I can understand why the threshold was set as a monthly under Metcard, but with Myki there’s no reason to effectively discriminate in favour of commuters and against people who use the system regularly but not in a pattern that requires a 28-day pass.